How Campus Bullies Pulled Off the Anti-Israel BDS Movement

Today, thanks to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, launched in 2005, campuses around the world are treated every year to Israeli Apartheid Week. The plan, orchestrated by an array of student and non-student organizations, and aided by academic departments that host breathtakingly dishonest anti-Israel speakers, is to depict Israel as just like apartheid-era South Africa.

The equation of Zionism with racism is again fashionable.

In November 1975, the U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Zionism held and still holds that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in its historic homeland, or that Israel has a right to exist.

Not everyone who claims that Zionism is racism is an anti-Semite. But the claim is anti-Semitic because it demonizes the Jewish people’s determination not to be at the mercy of others, a determination that is questioned only when Jews exhibit it.

That is why Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N, said that through Resolution 3379, “the abomination of anti-Semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.” In 1991, Resolution 3379 was rescinded, on an overwhelming 111-25 vote. For a time, it was unfashionable to equate Zionism with racism.

This slander would be bad enough if it referred solely to Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu. But just last month, protesters disrupting a Students Supporting Israel event at UCLA, shouted clarifying words: “We don’t want two states. We want 48!” Meaning 1948, before the establishment of Israel. As Andrew Pessin and Doron Ben-Atar explain in the introduction to their important book, Anti-Zionism on Campus, Omar Bhargouti, a co-founder of the BDS movement, merely rehashed “opinions expressed countless times by BDS leaders and activists” when he said in 2013, “most definitely we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.”

Anti-Zionism on Campus consists of 32 essays, 25 by scholars, 7 by students which together make the case that those who speak up for Israel on campus, or merely deny that Zionism is racism, risk “verbal attack, social and professional ostracization,” and “setbacks to their careers.” As an undisguised Zionist, who has so far avoided such consequences, I read Anti-Zionism on Campus as a skeptic. By the time I finished the book, I was convinced.

It is hard to believe that BDS activists, a very small group of faculty and students, have so much influence. But administrators can offer a helping hand. When in 2013, the American Studies Association voted to join the BDS movement, Ben-Atar, a professor of history at Fordham University, argued that Fordham should break ties with the Association. Shortly thereafter, Anastasia Coleman, Fordham’s director of Institutional Equity and Compliance opened an investigation. Ben-Atar had been charged by a colleague with religious discrimination, as he learned only after the investigation was closed. Coleman cleared him of that charge but recommended that he be disciplined for incivility.

At Northern Michigan State University, in 2011, Gabriel Noah Brahm complained of the lopsidedly anti-Israel character of a university-sponsored visit to Israel. He was soon “up on some kind of charges.” He was cleared, but the cloud that hung over him almost certainly contributed to his English Department colleagues’ hostility to his tenure bid. The resulting tenure denial was overturned by a unanimous vote, but Brahm had been put through the wringer.

In 2013, Yaron Raviv, a professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College confronted, intemperately, an anti-Israel protester. He found himself, perhaps appropriately, under investigation. Though Claremont took him to task for cursing out a student, Raviv was cleared of all other charges, including harassment and interfering with a demonstration. Indeed, the administration found that the protest violated college policy.

Nonetheless, Raviv was subjected to a public smear campaign, painting him as a racist. Meanwhile, Pitzer College, where the protester studied, launched its own, one-sided, investigation, in which Raviv, who had filed his own grievance, was not interviewed. Pitzer’s findings, unlike Claremont’s faulted only Raviv. The smear campaign took a toll on Raviv who received several unnerving notes and phone messages, one of which said, “Hitler had the right idea.”

Faculty are not guiltless in these transactions. The campaign against Raviv was led by a Pitzer professor. Worse, the faculty of Scripps College, whose sole connection to the incident is being part of a consortium that includes Claremont and Pitzer, voted up a statement against Raviv. When Shlomo Dubnov, a professor of music at the University of San Diego, opposed, in 2012, an anti-Israel divestment resolution, false and serious charges against him were retailed on the website of the San Diego Faculty Association with the active support of that body’s head.

Although we encounter a few good actors in Anti-Zionism on Campus, the essay’s authors teach one to expect from colleagues, at best, private messages of support when the campus anti-Israel movement comes for you and at worst their active participation in the, to coin a phrase, witch hunt.

Why is that when BDS activists are a small minority? First, few who see what happens to people like Ben-Atar, Brahm, Dubnov, and Raviv, are eager to contradict the BDS crew. Charges of racism and Islamophobia are damaging even when they do not stick. Second, BDS activists find support in a wider left-wing tale, in which all species of oppression are linked to colonial oppressors. As Judea Pearl, professor of computer science at UCLA says in his essay, Israel is useful in a period in which “white settlers . . . have long disappeared from the earth” and “must be reinvented to fit the villain script.” To be part of the left, then, you must renounce Zionism.

Third, the left neglects anti-Semitism. When the National Women’s Studies Association, which has endorsed BDS, issued a statement in response to white supremacist activity in Charlottesville, they linked fascism to ableism, settler-colonialism, and misogyny. They left out anti-Semitism! Though they would amend the statement, the original is telling. Nor is it uncharacteristic as Janet Freedman, resident scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Center, explains in her superb contribution.

Ernest Sternberg, professor or urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo is right that BDS provides “the thrill of solidarity achieved through the identification of the cosmic enemy,” responsible for the world’s ills and conveniently Jewish. But Sternberg and the volume’s editors appeal not only to those who care about justice but also to those who care about the integrity of universities. To us, the actions of BDS, from launching propaganda campaigns against dissenters, to transmitting conspiracy theories about Israel, badly damage universities. The BDS movement, Ben-Atar and Pessin say, “reintroduces tropes of the oldest hated into everyday discourse. It replaces respectful dialogue with sanctimonious Manicheanism. It stifles and silences debate”

That’s true. But Anti-Zionism on Campus alerted even an anti-BDS regular like me that there are more allies than one might have imagined, including on the left, who understand the threat. At the risk of seeming unsophisticated, I venture to say that BDS succeeds to the limited extent it does only because feckless administrators and fearful professors will not stand up to bullies. May this much-needed book help more of them understand that there are a lot more of us than there are of them.

I had been reading the book “Professions of a Lucky Jew” by Benno Weiser Varon. It starts with his life in Vienna in 1930s. Chapters 12-15 are about Nazi activities in university. “In 1932 Benno Weiser was a student of medicine in Vienna. During a brawl at the Anatomic Institute he rescued a Jewish fellow student, when he cracked the scull of a huge Nazi with two outsized metal keys.”

Quote from the book: “They are a small minority,” Lotte said consolingly, meaning the Nazis. “In Austria, perhaps, but not at the university. And that’s where the professionals, educators, and ideologists of tomorrow are being formed.” This book shows many similarities between Vienna of 1932 and USA in 2018.

Both Zionists and their opponents agree that Zionism and the State of Israel constitute a revolution in Jewish history, a revolution that began with the emancipation and the secularization of European Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries

“the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in its historic homeland”

The people who lived there more recently have more of a right. Zionists never present it as a clash of two claims, the right of all Jews to “return” to Palestine vs. the right of ethnically-cleansed (within living memory) people and their descendants to return to the place they were ethnically cleansed from. These two rights are incompatible, so you have to decide which is the greater.

If you really think the controlling issue is ‘Who was there more recently,” then clearly you will have to side with the Israelis since the vast majority were born there and the state was there as recently as this morning. Also, in the US you will need to abrogate all Native American rights as they their land claims are not “recent.” Indeed, you will need to end all aboriginal rights everywhere. Are these your positions?

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Reader Letter of the Week

There are two real dangers to this anti-white mindset that its proponents don’t seem to comprehend.

First, a minority of foolish and morally bankrupt white people can, will, and do buy all the social justice arguments and place themselves on the other side. That’s how you get white nationalist groups who say, “Yes, it is a power struggle between whites and everyone else, and we intend to come out on top.”

Second, and far more serious, the vast majority of white people who still hold to the tenets of individualism and equality will see the social justice warriors as a real and direct threat to their safety, culture, and future and react accordingly. As when we fought the Nazis and the Communists, there’s no need to agree with an enemy or even hold him in any regard as serious to recognize him and defeat him.

Either way, the result is division, civil unrest, and even war. Unfortunately, in this case, the SJWs have created a landscape in which there is no middle ground. It is one side or the other. The Feminists will fall first because there is no way to have a serious conflict between the sexes, and women are immensely practical creatures. But the other groups will find themselves in a very nasty position of facing a frightened and angry majority that has no intention of offering itself up for sacrifice. And when they mobilize, the “battle” won’t be metaphorical.

David S. Zondy

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